New Kongregate Version - Forum Edition! (CR 2009.09.15)

Well, as many of you forum-goers have noticed by now, there have been a few changes to Kongregate since last night. We rolled out a new release with special emphasis on our forums. We now have game-specific forums, the ability to flag offensive posts, and more efficient tools for our forum moderators. Check out all the details in the changelog below, though you can also view the full (non-incremental) one at any time here.

As always, please feel free to add comments, questions, and suggestions to this thread.

CR 2009.09.15

Users:
- The major change to this release is the new inclusion of game-specific forums. We can now give some of the best and most popular games their own, dedicated forums. You can see a few of these featured on our main forums page, and they are all visible on our new game forums page. You'll see we've started out with twelve awesome games, including some popular multiplayer ones, some deep, strategic single player ones, and some of our favorite Kongregate-sponsored games too. We'll add some more in the future, but for now we're going to start with these and see how they go.
- These forums are also visible on the individual game pages. You'll be able to see the ten most recently updated threads in a tab with the comments at the bottom of the page, and there will be links to jump (in a new tab or window so you don't lose your game's progress!) directly to the forums or even a particular thread.
- Since we're anticipating an increase in forum activity, we've added a few tools to help us keep the forums the clean, beautiful bastions of freedom and good will that they have always been. On your end, if you see a post that is offensive in some way, please flag it using the new Flag Post button, and give us a specific reason why you think it should be removed. (Note though that fake or even joking flags will not be appreciated as they make more work for us, and may result in a silence or ban on your account instead)
- You'll now also see some posts that have be deleted by moderators. The forum mods now have the ability to just hide a post rather than trying to go in and edit out any offensiveness. This will help them be much more efficient and save the trouble of trying to bleep out someone's profanity-filled text. Also, please feel free to thank our forum mods - just like our chat mods they are volunteers who have devoted countless hours to help maintain the Kongregate community at the high level that it has become. :)
- Since we were redoing some forum features anyway, we took the time to reorganize our forums on the main forums page. Now they're in nice, logical categories, rather than fairly randomly scattered about.
- Embed tags are no longer available on the forums (and haven't been for about a week). Thanks to some schmuck embedding pop-up scripts in threads we can now no longer have embedded Youtube videos either. Sorry everyone, but security had to come first.
- You'll now see forum titles and thread titles in the URLs of forum posts. Note that these are optional, so http://www.kongregate.com/forums/1/topics/1 and http://www.kongregate.com/forums/1-kongregate/topics/1-first both go to the same place. All old links will work fine, but new ones will be more informative like this.
- Added a cool new feature that will keep links from breaking in threads that are moved. You may notice this as well if you type in the wrong URL by hand - we check the thread number, which is unique, and automatically correct the forum number if it was wrong.
- Fixed a bug that was causing some issues with comments and other statistics on Zening.
- Game comment pagination is now not done by page number but rather by using forward-backward buttons. This significantly reduces database load and is much snappier too!
- Patched up some miscellaneous security issues.
- Forum watching (i.e. "Watch This Topic") should now be working again.
- You'll see a new "Follow Us On Twitter" link at the bottom of the page. Now you can keep up with our insane musings as well as new badge releases and features, which will be announced there. Check it out!

Yeah, I noticed the Flag option too, but I thought it was a feature of aC’s updated script. :3 Great bug fixes out there guys. Thanks for keeping us informed about the up-to-date Kongregate versions, Phoenix. :-)

You’re right that in most cases they’re unneeded, but for the big games that have major communities around them they can be quite useful. These are games that have numerous threads created about them and get talked about a lot in chat. We’re helping communities more easily stick together and talk about their interests in these games. I suppose we’ll see how it turns out, but we tested it with Battalion a few weeks ago and had 100 threads with over 1000 posts in it, so it was fairly successful.

Furthermore, I always found it frustrating searching for guides about such big games via the search bar. (as typing "Sonny 2 ended up in 2000+ results). I foung the new category pretty useful as it makes it easier for people who want to find guides, or listen to other people’s opinions about Kongregate’s most popular games. :-)

Yeah, someone else just reported the -1 topic as well. I think Ventero was correct (in the Tech Support thread) when he guessed that the topics we moved in there by hand didn’t increase the thread count, but that we probably deleted a topic that did decrease it. Whoops. Not sure if we’ll be able to fix that or if it’ll just be a few threads low in its count…

Can you be more specific? Just to be clear, Elements is not featured on our main forums page. You’ll need to look at the game forums (http://www.kongregate.com/forums/games) to see it. There’s also a link to that page at the bottom of the Games section on the main forums page.

Can you be more specific? Just to be clear, Elements is not featured on our main forums page. You’ll need to look at the game forums (http://www.kongregate.com/forums/games) to see it. There’s also a link to that page at the bottom of the Games section on the main forums page.

My guess is we’ll end up rotating which ones are featured on the main page while the others will all collect on /forums/games and be visible on their respective pages. That way we can feature a fair number of games without them crowding our main forum page. Unlike a certain major game company (http://forums.xbox.com/) who doesn’t seem to understand basic page-length guidelines of web design. Please note, I am not responsible if Microsoft’s Official Xbox forum crashes your browser.

My guess is we’ll end up rotating which ones are featured on the main page while the others will all collect on /forums/games and be visible on their respective pages. That way we can feature a fair number of games without them crowding our main forum page.

Can I take that when there are forums for like, 100 games, the /forums/games will have pages, each one showing something like 20 games or so, or it will just put all 100 at once? – Yeah, I know it kind of early to think of something like this, but the question just hit me =P

I’m not sure Aidan. I can tell you I don’t think we’ll follow Xbox’s example, but other than that I’m not sure. Pagination makes sense to me, or perhaps sorting by name (A – E, F – K, L – R, S – Z or something like that).

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